In 1902 the Ronuk factory at Portslade was established; it
was previously at Providence Place, Brighton. Mr T. Horace Fowler was the
founder and managing director and was popularly known as the Guv’nor; he was
born 11 March 1869 and died 31 January 1944.

It was said to be his father who
had formulated a special polish at Brighton that he called Fowler’s Wax
Composition. In the 1920s Ronuk workers believed the legend that it was in fact
Mr Fowler’s mother who invented the polish at her house near Holland Road Halt,
Hove. Whoever the true inventor was, Ronuk changed over the years. Fowler’s Wax
Polish was unscented and a nasty, putty colour but it evolved into a warm red
polish with a distinctive smell.

It was not until 23 January 1896
that Ronuk was registered as a trademark (number 192585). The word ‘Ronuk’ was
an Anglicised form of a word suggested by an ex-Indian Army officer signifying
brilliance. The company also took the opportunity of registering the name spelt
backwards – Kunor. It is amusing to note that the famous polish might have been
called ‘Taisk’ because this was the runner-up in the list of suggested names.

When the Ronuk factory was built
at Portslade on a site north of the railway line and south of Victoria Road,
the surroundings were relatively rural and old-time workers remembered when
pigs from a nearby field suddenly invaded the site. In fact in July 1907 Ronuk
lodged a formal complaint with Portslade Council concerning the adjacent
piggeries.

At Portslade Ronuk went from
strength to strength. Additions were built in 1906 and 1909 and a 1913
extension included more space for the factory, new offices and a caretaker’s
cottage. In fact the factory became such a hive of activity that special
railway sidings were constructed in 1919 / 1920 for Ronuk and the Metal Box
Factory also used the facility. In 1920 a canteen was created for the workers
and more new offices were built in 1922. The crowning achievement was the
construction of Ronuk Hall and Welfare Institute that opened in 1928. It is the
only part of the Ronuk site still extant. Later it became Portslade Town Hall
and in 2016 it is still host to Brighton & Hove City Council meetings while
Hove Town Hall is being renovated.

Ronuk became so well known that
misdirected letters usually found their way to Portslade. There was a famous
example when an order for Ronuk polish was mistakenly despatched to Port Said
instead of Portslade. But after a detour to Egypt it made its way back to
Portslade.

At first Ronuk produced its own
tins on site but later Barclay & Fry, Fishersgate, produced them and
latterly the Metal Box Company, Portslade, made them.

On 17 October 1924 the Duke and
Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) arrived in Portslade
to visit Ronuk. At the time the Duke was president of the Industrial Welfare
Society and it was the Duchess’s first visit to an industrial establishment
since her marriage.

The prospect of a royal visit
caused at flurry of activity at Ronuk. New paint was applied to the walls that
the Duke and Duchess would pass but amusingly enough, the paint only extended
halfway up. On the day itself gardeners arrived with armfuls of fresh-cut
flowers, which they solemnly proceeded to push into the earth.

Waiting to greet the Duke and
Duchess were 1,800 schoolchildren and a large crowd of residents. The Portslade
& District branch of the Royal British Legion formed a guard of honour and
the Duke shook hands with Private Vinter of the 7th Battalion, Royal
Sussex Regiment who had lost a leg in the Great War but still managed to march
on his crutches with his comrades. The band of Portslade Industrial School was
also in attendance.

The Duchess wore a coat and skirt
of rust red velour and a black cloche hat ‘caught up in front with a diamond
arrow and finished with a long tassel at one side of rust ostrich feathers’.

Directors H.T. Fowler and P.W.
Felton, and D.F. Sundius Smith, chairman of Portslade Council, greeted the
royal couple while two of the younger Ronuk girls presented the Duchess with a
bouquet of choice roses. These were not the only flowers the Duchess received
because at the conclusion of their visit she was given a bouquet of crimson and
bronze chrysanthemums with the message Loyal Greetings from St Nicolas’s Girls’ School.Young Miss Adams, whose father had been severely injured in
the Great War, presented the flowers.

During their tour of the factory
the Duke screwed down one of the brushes in course of manufacture and the
Duchess labelled two bottles. They were most interested in the canteen
facilities and went through to the kitchen to watch lunch being prepared.

After the visit to Ronuk the Duke
and Duchess had lunch in the Council Chamber at Hove Town Hall before moving on
to Brighton where the Duke opened an exhibition. Then there was a visit to the
Royal Pavilion.

As for the Ronuk workers, they were given
a half-day holiday and there was a party at the Ralli Hall, Hove.

A Report in the Sussex County MagazineLady Kate wrote an article about Ronuk in
the 1930s and she was much impressed with everything she was shown. The speed
of the girls who whipped the lids onto the tins of polish merited a special
mention. They kept a nest of lids under one arm and had the operation down to a
fine art. Lady Kate wrote ‘the dexterity … of the relays of girls who fit on
the lids as tins … glide by, are amongst the sights of the factory. Really, it
almost resembles a clever sleight of hand entertainment, in which the quickness
of the hands deceives the eye.’

Ronuk Products

Ronuk Sanitary floor polish was sold in different sized
tins to meet all requirements. There were large tins for commercial use (Ronuk
was a great favourite to use in polishing hospital floors and in 1913 was
awarded a gold medal at the 17th International Congress of Medicine
at London); a standard tin cost 1/9d, a small tin cost 6d and there was even a
tiny tin around the size of a two-penny piece for samples.

In the 1920s Dirsof was a new product sold in little blue
jars containing non-scratch cream polish. Ronuk boot polish was sold in mauve
tins.

By 1946 Ronuk was also producing

Household Ronuk

Ronuk Red Tile Polish

Ronuk Ballroom Powder

Ronuk Carshine

Ronuk Carwax

Later on the wood dye, boot
polish and car polish were sold under the names ‘Colton’ and ‘Ronseal’.

Ronuk was very good at publicity. There were many
advertisements of course but they also organised popular puzzle competitions
with cash prizes. When the first prize was advertised as £1,000 – a
considerable sum in those days – there was an avalanche of entries and a great
deal of publicity was garnered.

On the lids of boot polish was
the slogan The Brightest Shine in the Shortest Time. The later owners of
Ronuk invented the snappy it does what it says on the tin for their
Colton products.

During both world wars there was a chronic shortage of
tin. Just in case the worse came to the worst, Ronuk experimented with
different types of packaging. In the Great War emergency tests were carried out
on the suitability of packing the polish into sausage skins.

In the Second World War staff
working on alternative packaging favoured greaseproof paper bags.

Staff Memories

Elsie Peirce

In around 1920 Elsie Peirce started work at Ronuk and
earned 14/6d a week. The girls clocked on at 7.50 a.m. and the boys followed
suit ten minutes afterwards. Before the canteen was established, staff brought
in their own food to eat at lunch-time in two little rooms, once again
segregated by sex. There was no break for elevenses but you were allowed to eat
something at your workbench; thus the saying at the factory ‘a mouthful of
bread and a mouthful of Ronuk’.

Tins were laid out on a bench and
filled manually from a jug full of molten red polish with the brass tap being
turned on and off at each tin. At the end of the day the men responsible for
this task were almost reeling from the inhaled effects of turpentine, beeswax
and whatever else was in the polish. The girls soon acquired extraordinary
dexterity in putting on the lids rapidly and in Elsie’s day Johnnie Page
supervised this operation. If a girl missed her aim and the lid dented the
polish, the tin was taken out of production, scrapped out and refilled.

Elsie was busily engaged at her
workbench on 17 October 1924 when the Duke and Duchess of York came on a visit
to Ronuk.

The factory closed down for a
week at the beginning of August and everyone went on holiday. The management
also provided an annual charabanc excursion for staff; this time the sexes were
not separated and many a Ronuk romance began on these excursions. The charabanc
visited such places as the Isle of Wight and in 1925 it was Hastings.

There was also a vibrant social
life at Ronuk and there was something to do every night of the week. Miss
Lawrence, who worked in the office during the day, taught girls ballet in the
evenings; the girls also had the use of a gym. In the grounds there were tennis
courts and beautifully kept grounds with lawns and plants. A ten-minute walk
away there was a seven-acre sports ground where staff could play stoolball,
football and cricket together with a pavilion and changing rooms.

There was a full-time Welfare
Supervisor and a trained hospital nurse; there was a Thrift Club and a Staff
Savings Fund to encourage them to save money for their old age.

Ronuk provided the girls who
lived at Brighton with a quarterly season ticket that cost 13/-. The train
drivers all knew the contingent from Ronuk and would hold up their trains until
all were safely aboard.

During the General Strike of 1926
there were no trains and the company sent a van to Seven Dials to pick up the
girls for work. However, they were not so obliging in making sure they got home
afterwards and the girls had to shift for themselves. On one occasion some
girls walked up to the Old Shoreham Road and hitched a lift on a passing
hay-cart.

Edith Annie Ford

She was born at Hove in 1900 but
a few years later, the family moved to Portslade. Edith was the eldest child
and she had four siblings. Edith attended St Nicolas’s Girls’ School where she
particularly enjoyed the sewing class; sewing was viewed as a serious
accomplishment and indeed it became Edith’s favourite pastime. At school she
and the other girls sewed surgeons’ gowns for use at Hove Hospital. Even after
Edith left school, she never went anywhere without a piece of sewing or crochet
work in her bag. She went to work at Ronuk and one day feeling in high spirits
at lunch, she swung her bag around and somehow her crochet hook became embedded
in another girl’s arm. Matron soon arrived to deal with the situation and
insisted that from then on Edith must keep a cork on the end of her crochet
hook.

Edith remembered the poignant
occasion when she and the other girls at Ronuk leant out of the windows to wave
goodbye to the line of soldiers marching along the road on their way to war.

Although working at Ronuk was
considered as a feather in a girl’s cap, it seems that Mrs Ford did not think
it was a ladylike enough occupation for her Edith. She saw an advertisement for
a cashier at a greengrocer’s shop on the corner of Lansdowne Place, Hove, and thought
it was just right for Edith. She lost no time in marching into the manager’s
office at Ronuk and boldly announcing her daughter was leaving at once. When
the manager remarked mildly that it was customary to give a week’s notice
otherwise a week’s wages would be lost, Mrs Ford replied loftily ‘Then we’ll
leave the money.’

Ken Chambers

He was only aged fifteen when he
joined the Ronuk workforce as a junior clerk in May 1937; he earned 12/6d a
week. He was put to work in the correspondence room where he dutifully stamped
the mail and did some filing. His duties also included answering the telephone,
which was not freestanding in the room but housed in a separate kiosk.

He enjoyed the social side,
particularly the annual staff outing. On 3 June 1937 they went to Richmond and
he also took part in the outings of 1938 and 1939. Another perk was that all
refreshments during the day and lunch in the hall were free.

In October 1939 he moved to the
order and ledger room where he helped to price incoming orders. It was quite a
responsibility for such a youngster because there was no mechanical help in
doing the sums – all calculations were done in his head. He also looked after
the canteen accounts. On occasions he was obliged to relieve the gatekeeper and
when necessary to sound the work’s air raid warning siren.

Many men had already left Ronuk
to join the war effort and in November 1940 he joined their number by going to
work on a farm in Derbyshire under the YMCA’s scheme ‘British Boys for British
Farms’. Whilst he was there he received an unexpected gift from Ronuk; it
contained a Swan fountain pen and a Morden pencil.

Eric Cosstick

Shortly after his 14th
birthday in July 1938 he left school and started work at Ronuk. When he arrived
he was surprised to find the place practically deserted because the factory was
closed for the annual holiday. But that did not matter as far as he was
concerned because he was given a tin of paint and a brush and told to paint the
wooden fence around the site.

When the factory returned to normal working, he was put in
the transport office under the eye of Mr Cox, transport manager, although it
was Wally Cooper who trained him. He did not remain in the office all the time
and every Friday he was despatched to London aboard the 7.20 a.m. fast train
from Hove to London Bridge. This was so that he could become familiar with the
various London districts to which Ronuk sent their goods, such as hospitals and
docks. Charles Poulter, a driver, had the task of imparting the necessary
geography.

When the Second World War broke
out, the composition of the workforce changed. This was because many of the
male workers were members of the Territorial Army and were mobilised. It meant
females far outnumbered the remaining male employees.

In 1941 Mr Cox, transport
manager, had to go into hospital to have the cataracts removed from both eyes.
In those days it was a major operation and it was three months before he was
considered fit enough to return to work. Meanwhile, 16-year old Cosstick had to
man the fort and run the rail and transport office all by himself. When Mr Cox
returned, the management recognised Cosstick’s valiant efforts by awarding him
the princely sum of £1.

Cosstick left Ronuk in 1941 and
joined the RAF. He was demobbed in 1947 and returned to Ronuk for a couple of
years. His sister Dulcie worked at Ronuk from 1934 to 1948. She did well there
and ended up as a forewoman, a post that had been exclusively held by males
before then.

John Dobbie

He too went to work at Ronuk after
leaving school in the late 1950s. At first he was in the wages office where
things had progressed from mental calculations to a clumsy electro-mechanical
adding machine and a manual ‘comptometer’. Invoice record keeping had also been
updated to a punch-card system but the old system of manual records was kept up
for a long time afterwards as a back-up system and it was needed quite often.

Old-fashioned methods were still
employed for clocking-on. There was a ledger at the gatehouse and every member of
staff had to sign in together with their time of arrival. Anybody who arrived
late would find that the internal postman had spirited away the ledger. This
internal postman was nicknamed ‘The Major’ because he was ex-military and his
surname was Cottingham.

Later on Dobbie moved to the
laboratory. This was more his cup of tea because he was also studying chemistry
at night school. When tankers of solvents arrived at the railway sidings it was
his job to take samples and test them.

It seems that by Dobbie’s time,
Ronuk staff no longer had the use of the canteen in the hall. Instead, he
remembered a rudimentary canteen for tea and somewhere to eat their sandwiches.
The office staff found themselves in a more fortunate position because they
were able to go across the road and use the canteen at the Fryco factory
opposite. Dobbie also remembered that at least two editions of the popular
radio programme Workers’ Playtime were transmitted from the Fryco
Factory.

He met a charming young lady in
the Ronuk office who later became Mrs Dobbie. He stayed on at Ronuk until
shortly before the business moved up north.

Isabel Thomson

Isabel was seventeen years old when she started work at Ronuk in 1956. It was quite a shock to the system because there did not seem to be any training or preparation to enable a newcomer to cope with factory conditions. It was more of a case of being thrown in at the deep end and having to sink or swim.

In Isabel’s case, it was straight to the conveyor belt where tins of red polish sailed past at what seemed like a dizzying rate. There was no way she could match the dexterity of girls who were well used to the work.

Isabel’s task was to place a circle of greaseproof paper on top of the polish before lids were clamped on further down the line. She found that most of the tins were well out of reach before she could cover the polish. As for the rest, she did manage to place some rounds of greaseproof paper but they were certainly not in a central position. In addition, many a tin of perfectly smooth red polish bore the marks of her fingerprints.

The girls spent their entire working day standing on a concrete floor that was both uneven and cold. They were not allowed to chat with one another. It seemed a pretty, grim place to Isabel.

But she did hear an interesting item about the girls who worked in the packing department. Apparently, they knew that many Ronuk products were sent to the Royal Navy and so they used to include letters in the boxes. It would be fascinating to know whether or not any sailor ever replied to the Ronuk girls.

Isabel went home after her first day at Ronuk looking forward to her tea. But when she sat down she found the table was acting in a peculiar fashion – it seemed to be moving just like the conveyor belt. It made her feel quite strange and she lost her appetite.

Needless to say, her spell at Ronuk was of short duration.

John Leigh

Like other employees, John Leigh started his working life
at the age of fifteen and stayed at Ronuk from 1960 to 1965. At first he worked
in the Post Room under the eagle eye of Major Cottingham. Later he joined the
Post Room Department where he got to know two Ronuk stalwarts, namely Chris
Holland and Archie Paris. These two spent their entire working life at Ronuk
and indeed they are to be found in the group photograph taken in around 1916
and featured earlier in this article. Of course, by the time John Leigh knew
them, they did not bear much resemblance to their younger selves. It is sad to
record that when the factory closed they were made redundant and their long
years of loyal service were rewarded with precisely three weeks’ extra wages.

John Leigh remembered his years
at Ronuk as a happy time and he, like the rest of the staff, particularly
enjoyed the annual staff outing. He remembers especially the outing they made
to Battersea Fun Fair.

Perhaps Ronuk forgot to move with
the times and John Leigh considers Newton Chambers took over the firm for
virtually nothing. This was despite Ronuk’s successful Ronseal and Colron
brands that, ironically, are still on sale.

John Leigh had the pleasure of
meeting Kenneth Horne (1907-1969) who was a non-executive director of Ronuk in
the 1960s. This fact may come as a surprise to many people because they
remember him for his marvellous work on the radio such as Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh,
Beyond our Ken and Round the Horne. In fact Kenneth Horne started
his career as a businessman and became chairman and managing director of
well-known Chad Valley, toy manufacturers. It was a happy accident during his
wartime stint in the RAF that he came to the attention of the BBC. But he
regarded his radio work as an enjoyable sideline.

John Leigh had further experience of show business after leaving Ronuk. During the 1960s and 1970s he became a leading concert promoter at the Dome, Brighton, booking such artists as Roy Orbison and Scott Walker as well as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

By the 1950s the average age of the staff had changed. No
longer was the workforce predominately made up of young girls but instead of
part-time older females who were also wives and mothers. The number of workers
had also fallen due to increasing automation. The management no longer insisted
that women should keep their heads covered.

In the 1950s the Ronuk tanker,
holding 3,500 gallons, came directly to its Portslade sidings from Esso in
Southampton

Newton, Chambers & Co.
acquired Ronuk in the late 1950s. The Portslade factory closed and production
shifted up north to Sheffield.

On 28 July 1927 Miss Marion
Elizabeth Chignell laid the foundation stone of the Ronuk Hall and Welfare
Institute. Gilbert M. Simpson was the architect and the hall opened the
following year.

Miss Chignall was the daughter of
Robert Chignall, one of the first Ronuk directors, and she donated an organ for
the hall in his memory. Michell & Thyne built the organ in 1885 and it was
placed in the Great Hall above a shallow stage. The hall was also graced with
galleries and balustrades on the north and the south sides.

The Misses Chignall provided a
large sum of money to decorate the hall and the walls were adorned by a number
of paintings donated by artists who were famous in their day. Amongst this
number were Vicat Cole, Byam Shaw, Rex Padwick, Bertram Nicholls, Percy R.
Craft and Robin Wallace, many of them being friends and acquaintances of one of
the directors from the time when he sold them oil paints.

The Great Hall had a variety of
uses. During working hours it became a canteen. The girls sat at small separate
tables (around four apiece) covered with fresh, white tablecloths. Mr Fowler
frequently joined the workers to eat his lunch there too. The food was cooked
in a large, modern kitchen.

In the evenings the stage was
often used for amateur dramatics; one play put on by the employees was Trial
by Jury. There was also a Ronuk minstrel group, which became a very popular
turn. The participants blacked-up their faces just like other minstrel groups
of the time. There was enough space in the hall for an audience of 250 people.

The hall was also used for dances
and socials, billiards and badminton.

During the Second World War the
hall was taken over and used as a British Restaurant. These were set up from
1940 onwards to enable people in need to have a decent meal that cost no more than
a maximum of nine pennies. Originally, they were known by the dreadful title
‘Community Feeding Centres’. It was Winston Churchill who decided that they
should be called British Restaurants.

In 1959 Portslade-by-Sea Urban
District Council was able to purchase Ronuk Hall for £36,500 by disposing of
their old offices. On 2 September 1959 Robert Shields, chairman of PUDC,
officially opened Portslade Town Hall.

Sources

Argus4 April 2014 / 22 April 2014 / 8 May
2014 / 12 May 2014 / 26 May 2014Encyclopaedia of Hove and Portslade